


between two lungs

by Lycanthrowup



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anxiety, Body Horror, Childhood Trauma, Coming of Age, Mike Crew is 5'2", Mike Crew's Bastardization Arc, Mike hates his scar, Parent Death, The Desolation and The Vast get along but it's volatile, but he learns to accept it, by you know... giving up his humanity lol, haha get it? arc like lightning, how many allusions to the vast can i get away with before someone calls me out, the vast: what if i dip my toes into almost every other fear so i'm always relevant?, you ever see the extent of a forest fire and get hit with that sense of whoa... big
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:35:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25621471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lycanthrowup/pseuds/Lycanthrowup
Summary: Mike Crew was a pretty normal kid, he loved his mum, he liked learning, and he wanted desperately to make friends. His teen years were fraught with anxiety and a desperate hunt to make it all stop, the strive to be normal, until he gave up on normalcy entirely, a cursed book clutched in his hands.As an adult, he was a monster. Not the worst kind, but still a monster.Or: Mike Crew grows up, he wonders if his mum would be proud of him.(edited: august 4 to include an additional scene)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	between two lungs

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second fic i've written with the exact same premise and you can't stop me!
> 
> (I added a scene cause i realized at work today that it was... kind of an awkward and empty transition?? Also this fic doens't have enough horror? wtf? Anyways, it's around the boneturner bit)

Mike is 14 and starting at a new school in the fall. Obviously, he wants to make a good first impression. He’d been homeschooled and tutored for a few years following his accident but had gotten back to a proper school when he was 10. Last year, he’d had a panic attack on a field trip and refused to go back for the rest of the year. Not that they’d probably want him back, what with the many absences and times he had just up and left. Not like he had any friends anymore. He and Dominic had drifted apart years ago.

His parents did their best to understand, but they were only human, and they got fed up with him sometimes.

Regardless, Mike wants to make a good first impression so maybe he can make a friend. Which is why he’s in his mother’s makeup bag looking for her concealer. The people who _liked_ the scar got bored with him after they realized he wasn’t actually fun and the people who wouldn’t mind his nerves were usually freaked out by it. It had to go. At least the portion that snaked up onto his face, his scarves could do the rest.

When he found what he was looking for he sat on the toilet, handheld mirror in hand and stared at himself for a minute. He’d seen his mum put her makeup on before, but he didn’t know if he needed multiple things or if the concealer itself was enough.

Mike took a steadying breath and spread some of it under his eye and down his jaw and rubbed it in.

It didn’t… look right. It didn’t look right the next time either. Or the next. By the time he heard a knock on the door and his mum calling out to him his face was red from the amount of times he’d scrubbed a cloth over it to try again.

“One- one second, Mum!”

“Mike, it’s dinner time, what have you even been doing in there?”

He swallowed, “nothing.” His voice cracked.

The doorknob turned and he had half his scar covered in his mum’s makeup.

She froze, whatever she was about to say stuck in her throat. “Oh, Mike.”

He turned his face away, trying to hide away.

“Sweetheart, is this about school?”

He shrugged, trying to wipe the makeup off of his face.

His mum sighed and grabbed something from her makeup drawer, kneeling down in front of where he was sitting.

“Put the cloth down, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

Mike dropped his hand to his lap and nervously twisted the facecloth in his hands as his mum took his face in one hand and took a disposable wipe to his face, gently taking the rest of the makeup off.

“Come down to dinner, alright?”

“Okay.”

She kissed his forehead.

“I’ll help you with the scar tomorrow.”

He nodded, relief flooding his veins, “thanks, Mum.”

She smiled sadly, ruffling his hair as she walked away.

He makes a few friends that year. Until one mean spirited boy finds out he’s covering his scar with _makeup_ and he gets outcast, followed by the whispers and stares of his classmates.

He doesn’t try to make friends that year. His reputation was already ruined, anyways. His mother frets and worries and his father ignores the problem entirely.

He doesn’t eat as much; he’s always nauseous. He used to eat at home, where he believed he was safe. Now danger was lurking around every corner and he was looking over his shoulder at every turn. Sleep wasn’t much better.

Mike never had sleep paralysis before. Now it was a weekly feature of his life. The acrid smell of ozone flooding his senses, and the twisting jagged array of lightning vaguely shaped like a man reaching endlessly for him until it’s over and he’s left laying in his own sweat.

He stops talking almost entirely that year, something that hadn’t happened since he was 8.

Everyone who knew him before the strike told him he used to be so full of life, he just shrugs, a nervous grin tugging one corner of his mouth up. He doesn’t like how the scar moves when he smiles with both sides of his mouth.

Mike… stays small. Skinny and short while his peers all shoot up past him. His mum said he was just a late bloomer, but he’s lost hope in that awhile back.

He spends a lot of time between the library, his room, and an abandoned house down the street. Some of the kids at his school go there to smoke weed after classes. Mike tried it once, but it made his anxiety so bad that one of them, a girl a year younger than him, he thinks, had called an ambulance. Apparently, she thought he was dying. To be fair, he had felt like he was dying, as well.

The doctor had tried to get him to talk about it, but Mike had politely and then not so politely refused. The first time he had tried to talk about his problems, namely the creature of twisting lightning that stalked him relentlessly, they had put him on a medication that didn’t work, then tried another that didn’t work. He eventually stopped taking all of them but the anxiety pills. The pills were really the one thing that let him function through most of his classes, he’d be failing because of all the absences otherwise.

The house itself isn’t that old. Just abandoned and decrepit. He liked to climb up onto the roof and try to see constellations when it’s clear, sometimes he’d walk the edge of the roof, arms spread wide and think about jumping, just to feel the rush of air. The creature had yet to follow him here, it got close once but had vanished before it could get to the lawn. Whatever was up with this house was good luck for him, he’d thought.

He found the book late the next year.

_A Journal of the Plague Year._

The book was a tipping point in his life.

He’d thought, mistakenly, foolishly, that the creature was repelled by the book. It was. Sort of. He’d found some peace when it was with him and the night terrors weren’t nearly as frequent but, keeping it with him at school got complaints. Flies buzzed about the thing and it felt slimy to the touch, reminding him of the mushrooms he left in the fridge for too long.

So, he kept it in his room, under his bed.

He didn’t think much of the mould at first, he had gotten a book on mould from the library and wiped it with bleach and hoped for the best. The book was the only thing keeping him sane at this point and he wasn’t going to give it up over some moulding.

5 months later, he finds the Boneturners Tale.

He finds it when he’s exploring some library that looks to be on the verge of permanent closure. The basement is closed to the public, likely this would’ve been a measure even if it hadn’t been a decrepit place, full of moisture and books left to rot.

He’s been entering places after hours more often now. His mum worries, she asks him if anything is wrong and says she misses him. He doesn’t know what she means by that, he wishes she wouldn’t pry.

He picks a book up. Flips through a few pages and drops it to the ground. It’s ruined anyways, half of the pages are rotten and clumped together, it smells a bit metallic.

It’s the third book he finds, under a box full of abandoned nails and a hammer. _The Boneturners Tale._ He flips it open and there it is. That same seal that the _Journal_ has.

He takes it with him.

Or, he goes to take it with him.

When he walks up the creaky old stairs and turns a corner, he’s met with the flashlight of a security guard inches from his face, Mike nearly falls back down the stairs.

The man catches him by the shoulders, “whoa, there. What are you doing in the library after hours, young man?” The man’s fingers dig deep into his shoulders. He’s 6 feet tall and Mike is not getting out of this one easy. He swallows his terror, adrenaline spiking as he twists in place, dipping under the guard’s arm and tries to run, but the man changes his grip and gets a hold of Mikes arm instead, yanking him back. Mike looks up at him, mind frantically searching for a way out, the hallway seems longer than it did before, the stairs higher, twisting off into nothing.

He launches himself forwards and crashes into the guard, taking them both a few steps backwards and throwing them both off balance. Mike catches himself on the handrail and watches as the guard hits the stairs and bounces down, down, down to the ground.

He picks up _The Boneturners Tale_ from where it landed when he dropped it and runs.

It starts raining seconds before he gets inside, clambering up the ladder he’d left outside his window 3 days prior and hadn’t bothered to move yet. Lightning strikes in the distance and he almost falls.

Mike holes up in his room, headphones over his ears and Walkman turned up to the highest volume as he reads, the pounding of the rain and the crack of thunder rendered nearly inaudible.

The storm clears after awhile, rain dying down to a drizzle then to nothing. Mike chews on his lip and decides to do something stupid.

He returns to the scene of the crime. He leave’s his room, book in hand, and walks back down to the library. He picks the lock on the backdoor and gently closes it behind himself, locking it quietly. Mike takes a deep breath and walks over to the window he’d left by earlier that night and slides it open, staring out at the alley while he gathers himself.

When he’s done stalling, he walks back down the hall and into the main area before he gets to the other hall that leads him directly to the dead security guard. Or, he hopes he’s dead. If he’s not dead Mike’s going to have a problem on his hands. At the very least he hopes the guard can’t move if he _is_ alive. Mike really wouldn’t survive prison. Or wherever they’d send him.

He gets to the stairs and stares down into the dark basement. His hands clench tighter around the book, knuckles threatening to break free of his flesh.

“Here goes nothing.” Mike whispered, bouncing on his heels to try and shake some life back into his legs.

When he gets to the last step, the body sprawled in front of him, arm bent awkwardly under him and his neck was… well it wasn’t _right_.

Mike sits on the last step and props the book open on his lap. He doesn’t quite know what to do from here. He starts trying to read certain passages aloud, trying to focus on straightening the dead man’s neck out.

Reading didn’t seem to be doing the trick. He closed the book, placing his hand on the cover and trying to focus. Tried to imagine the crooked bones moving into the correct position. There was a pop, followed by some wet ripping noises, and then a crack,, and when he opened his eyes, the flesh had peeled back over the bones of the mans spine and had straightened out, the neck itself was still bent out of place, the bones arcing over nothing and suspended, held together by the bits of muscle that still clings to the bone, trying to reabsorb it into the body.

Mike tries a few more things, he cracks a wrist, as an experiment, then he peels the flesh back over the hand, watching as the bones of the fingers clatter to the ground. When he’s reasonably sure he has the hang of it he inches a little closer to the body, using his foot to roll it over, the exposed spine makes a hollow scraping sound as it moves along the concrete floor and Mike flinches away.

He doesn’t touch the man. Though he’s reasonably certain they’d find his DNA under the mans… fingernails. Mike quickly works on peeling the flesh away from the other hand. That problem solved; he goes back to looking for a scar of some kind. Anything would do really.

Mike finds his prize on the mans arm, the one that had been bent back under his body in the fall. He’d had his bright yellow sleeves shoved up to his elbows, which didn’t look easy given the material. Mike chewed at his lower lip. The scar was an inch long and had a very small amount of curve to it.

He started with making it longer, first. Then he made it jagged. He added the branching fractals as an afterthought. When he was done, he leaned back and looked at it. What was once an inch long now spanning his entire arm. Mike nodded and set to work undoing it. It took a lot longer than giving him the scar did, it was also much harder than cracking bones and peeling flesh.

However, when he was done the man’s arm was unmarked. The scar he’d had previously smoothed out into perfect, healthy skin. A bit pink, but, perfect.

Mike leaves through the window, smacking the frame so the latch falls back into place so no ones any wiser and he heads home.

When he gets back to his room, he stands there for a long moment book held tightly against his chest.

“I can do this.” He nods to himself.

He tiptoes to the bathroom and quietly shuts the door, locking it with a click. He sits on the toilet with the old handheld mirror in one hand and the book on his lap. He pulls his shirt off and he gets started.

It makes the scar worse, the fractals twisting further up his face and he spends the rest of the night sitting in the shower and letting the water pelt him until his fingers and toes go numb from the cold.

He drops it off at the Chiswick library the next day, not daring to go back to its original home a third time, he wraps it in the cover of another book he’d borrowed.

He’d long since learned to cover his scar himself so his parents were none the wiser, he isn’t sure they’d notice a few extra jagged lines being burned into his skin anyways.

Mike is not at home when it collapses. He’s out wandering old abandoned places, looking for trouble. When he see’s the flashing lights and the emergency vehicles he panics, thinking they found out about the security guard in the library. Maybe he had survived and gave Mikes description? This theory, Mike tried to reason with himself, was unlikely as he had followed the news nearly religiously until the guard’s face was in it, page 3, cause of death? Accident. Just a slip in an old, decaying building.

It makes sense when rot and decay finally catch up to him in a tangible way.

They recover the book from the rubble, and he drops it into a sewer.

His grandmother on his mother’s side plans the funerals. She hugged him, one hand on his back and the other petting his hair and told him she couldn’t take him in, but he was a young man now, and that he’d be okay. He nodded. She was old and lived in a home. Of course, he couldn’t live with her.

He gets the money and finds a place to live.

He’s searching the aisles of a library for new books, something to distract himself when he sees a children’s book, bright colours out of place with all the old books he’d been looking at. It’s the book his mother used to read to him when he was younger. He reaches out and let’s his fingers brush the bright, happy cover and he falls where he’s standing, it feels like an eternity before he hits the ground, breathless and choking on sobs as he clutches the book to his chest. It’s the first time he’s cried in months.

He keeps that one. The one she had actually read to him had been lost with everything else he had ever owned. He didn’t even have a photo of her left. Maybe his grandma had something.

He picks himself up and off of the ground eventually, grabbed the books he had dropped and signed them out.

He starts looking with conviction after that.

There had to be a book out there that would free him from the creature. He couldn’t just let his parents be dead for no reason. There had to be a purpose for it all.

He starts with a rare bookstore.

Mike had been reading up on anything he could get his hands-on surrounding demons for awhile now. He just never had the funds to try anything with any actual merit before.

So, he goes in and he asks for a book he’d been researching, and the man looks perplexed but provides him with a copy.

Lions Street Books becomes one of the places he almost frequents. It’s small, cramped, and filled from floor to ceiling with a vast array of books. The creature takes a moment to find him here and when it does it’s easy to leave, winding through the streets until he’s sure it’s gone. He mostly just likes the books. Herbert makes some suggestions on occasion, showing him new stock before anyone else. He makes a few attempts at asking Mike about his life but doesn’t get anything other than his name.

He doesn’t leave his flat when it’s raining anymore. There’s no one to force him outside, so he just… doesn’t.

Not all his books come from Herbert at Lions Street Books. The one in Cyrillic he’d found at a garage sale.

It… hadn’t been worth the money. He buried it where no one could find it and was done with that, he figured the Lonely would be fine with it.

He had been learning more about the fears, lately. He figured it was his best bet. The surest shot at freedom. It was also one of the biggest commitments he could make, like getting married but more permanent.

He’d found a book on how to bind a person to a book and studied it religiously. It was… specific. He would come back to that. He could try to bind the creature to a book, once he had the right one.

He rubbed at his scar and pulled his feet up and under himself, nibbling on a biscuit while he read. He was close to something, there was just something missing. Something important.

When Mike goes to the bookstore Herbert always asks him how he is and Mike shrugs and shoots a quiet “you?” back at him. It’s easy and impersonal. Mike doesn’t like Herbert but, he’s easy to just exist near.

Today Herbert leans on the counter, beckoning him closer.

“I got a new shipment in, recently. Thought you’d appreciate a look at something rather peculiar.”

Mike is 19 when everything falls into place.

He writes Herbert a cheque he knows won’t go through and takes the book and goes, flickering Lichtenberg figures dancing in the corners of his eyes. Distantly, he feels bad about the theft, but he thinks Herbert would understand. He’s a good man.

Mike holes up in his flat and dives headfirst into research. He thinks he has everything he needs now. He forgoes food for too long and has to stop when his vision blurs and hands won’t stop shaking, a gnawing hole forming in his gut.

He doesn’t remember Herbert showing up.

Or the creature, the _Spiral_ showing up.

He remembers running and running, and then… falling, down, down.

He wakes up, physically exhausted in the middle of nowhere _Ex Altiora_ clutched to his chest like a lifeline. He flips through it with bated breath, stopping when he sees his tormentors trapped form and he grins, wide and bright and starts laughing for the first time in years. He’s finally free.

Mike tries to reinvent himself. It takes a few tries to get anywhere, but he figured he owed it to himself to try. He probably owed it to his mother, at the very least.

He stops covering his scar first. Does away with the concealers and the powder and the bronzer and just _lives_ with it. He barely goes out the first week and when he does, he sends the first person to look at it for too long on a whirlwind plunge through eternity.

He feels a little better after that.

Mike goes to Alton Towers and spends the day riding the coasters, it’s a different kind of rush than what the Vast provides and when he’s done he throws himself to the empty sky in the middle of the ride and freefalls to his flat.

He knows that he has to feed the Vast fear but, he’s enjoying the feeling of vertigo and freefall for himself far too much to care at the moment. He’s like a child now, touching everything and running from thing to thing, taking joy in everything he possibly can.

He’s in his early 20’s and he’s finally experiencing _life_ , it’s a breath of fresh air and his stomach dropping out from under him and he’s thriving.

Mike decides to buy a suit after he meets Simon Fairchild and the man all but throws money at him, Mikes inheritance and insurance payout had long since dried up and he’d been working at a bookstore to make ends meet recently.

He buys the suit, getting it custom fit because the only worthwhile suits are custom fit. He also wouldn’t fit into anything fresh off the shelf.

He experiments with different looks and abandons his scarves for high collared shirts and a tie.

Mike abandons the tie before too long, it reminds him of his dad’s fingers at his neck, going through the motions for some event Mike hardly remembers. He thinks it was a wedding. It could’ve been a funeral.

It’s also restrictive. He unbuttons the collar a bit.

The suit is a gray three piece and he wears it in many different configurations for years to come, abandoning it only when he has to.

It’s the first thing he’s owned that fit him perfectly.

Mike stops hiding his scar entirely by the time he hits 22.

He meets other Avatars, but he wouldn’t say he’s particularly friendly with any of them. He’s rather unfriendly with Jude Perry but they keep in contact. She’s fun but, she’s crazy. He goes to clubs with her a few times and the aftermath always ends with him on the floor in front of a toilet and her laughter in his ear, telling him that he shouldn’t be so fucked up over alcohol, that he should try something harder. He still won’t touch drugs after his experience with weed at 14. He feels like it brought the Spiral closer and he didn’t want that at all, not after everything he’s done to escape it.

The first time he gets laid is when he’s out with Jude at a bar and she wraps an arm around his shoulders and introduces him to a man at the bar, grin wide and suggestive as she leaves them alone. The man is charming and funny enough to listen to and when he leans over and sets his hand on Mike’s knee and slides his thumb up his inner thigh, leaning in to ask if he’d like to get out of here in a voice that makes Mike shiver, he’s more than ready to go home with him. The guy offer’s him his number after, but Mike’s never been very romantically inclined. He takes it but, he doesn’t call.

The thing is, is that Mike has always been polite, but he’s also impatient and it’s easy to get under his skin which makes any interaction with Jude volatile, anything he says or does just feeds whatever bullshit she’s on, like a fan to a flame. She’s the first person he’s gotten snippy with in awhile. They aren’t friends in the end, but it’s close enough.

They keep track of each other.

He still doesn’t talk a lot, but speaking is easier than its been in a long time.

His grandmother dies and he has to plan a funeral.

The pang of guilt he feels over not visiting her is surprisingly dull.

The service is small, but beautiful. He throws Simon’s money at it to try and make up for being a horrible grandson, he doesn’t give a speech.

When Mike goes through her things, a small pitiful box, he finds a photo album, pictures of when his grandmother was a young girl through to an old lady, his mother throughout her life. He lingers on those photos. The wild way she grinned at the camera, covered in water and dirt, holding up a frog as a child. Her gymnastics photos, gracefully soaring through the air as a teen. Her prom, her wedding, in the hospital with him, a tiny, gross baby.

He doesn’t linger on his photos; he still has an odd relationship with photos of himself. The one he does look at is of him at 6 with missing front teeth, stretching his hands up to the sky from on top of the monkey bars, smile wide and happy.

He closes the album and brings it home with him.

Mike sets it beside _Ex Altiora_ on his bookshelf.

(He frames his parents wedding photo, it’s the only one he has without him also in it.)

He still has nightmares at times. Almost always about lightning. Sometimes it’s rot and coming home to find flashing lights and police and ambulances on his street, the neighbours all standing around, watching in horror, the collapsed remains of the house, his parents buried somewhere within.

On nights when he can’t sleep, he falls.

He has come to terms with the idea that bringing people fear doesn’t give him much in the way of a thrill. He’s always been more enamoured with feeling it himself. The constant thrum of anxiety throughout his childhood and teen years was… more than enough to give him a deep appreciation for immediate and justified fear.

When he needs to, he sacrifices people to the Vast to keep it sated. To stay in the fear entities good graces.

Otherwise Mike is more than happy to travel.

He goes anywhere and everywhere he’s ever read about, looking at old books and artifacts and chasing thrill after thrill.

He eventually decides to let go of _Ex Altiora_.

He’s 31 and he’s just seen Dominic Swain on a street corner 2 stories below him.

He wouldn’t have recognized him if the woman with him hadn’t groaned and used his first and last name in fond exasperation. It’s almost too convenient. Like someone’s set this up, or a scene from a movie.

Dominic doesn’t see him.

He wonders if Dominic remembers him at this point. Mike thinks they were 9 when they last saw one another. Dominic’s guilt causing him to make up excuses not to play with him was not… fresh in his memory, but he did remember how it felt. The nights he’d cried himself to sleep because his only friend hated him now.

Now Mike just feels contempt.

If Dominic had _stayed_ by him things would’ve been easier.

If Dominic hadn’t _insisted_ , they play outside longer things would’ve been so different.

If Dominic _hadn’t_ … it doesn’t matter, in the end.

Dominic _had_ and that was that.

The only good thing that came from this was Mike becoming an avatar of The Vast.

So, he leaves _Ex Altiora_ for him.

It’s a mercy if anything. Mike could kill him if he wanted to.

The book will find him, he knows it will.

He leaves after that, texts Jude something sarcastic about heading out and that she better water his plants while he’s gone. She sends him a screenful of fire emoji’s in response.

Hopefully, he will still have a flat when he gets back. Not like she needs a key to burn a building down.

Mike scoffs, locks his phone, and falls.

Falling will never cease to amaze him. The endless blue sky stretching around him, the cold air whipping at his hair and clothes, stinging at his eyes, the way his heart picks up in an old panic response.

When he lands, it’s not with grace, it’s more like a panicked reflex, like trying to catch yourself when you accidentally tip the chair you’re sitting in too far back. He lays there in the field for a moment, catching his breath and staring up into the sky.

It’s night here, not that he can see the stars for how cloudy it is. When he has his breathing under control, he can smell the rain in the air.

He gets up and starts walking.

Eventually he comes to the docks and strolls down and sits at the end of one, taking his shoes and socks off, rolls his trousers up and kicks his feet into the water.

Mike comes here when he needs space to think, to see the sea and the sky stretching out endlessly in front of him, blending together so you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.

He lost a part of himself that day when he and Dominic were playing, free and unburdened in the rain and he lost another, less important, part of himself the day he dedicated himself to the Vast.

Mike wonders if Dominic will see the monster in the book and think of him.

The void in his life where _Ex Altiora_ had inhabited is odd but not unwelcome. He adjusts to it.

In the end he loses one more piece of himself to Dominic Swain.

His flat, at least, is in one, unburnt piece when he returns.

He curls up on a chair near his window, a cup of tea and _Fixing the Sky_ on his lap, the book he had picked up on a whim, from a shop he’d stopped in at one day.

It’s raining out today, Mike hasn’t felt the need to cower form the rain or a strike of lightning in years. Not inside at least. He still hurried when the first drops of rain hit the ground, sometimes he’d stop in at shops and look around, pick a book up, until it stopped.

The old fear never did leave him entirely. It just got easier to manage.

Besides, storms were rather fascinating when he could watch them from the safety of a comfortable chair.

His phone lights up, Jude’s name, bracketed by fire emoji’s showing on the screen above a pair of eyes alongside _watch out_.

Mike frowns at his phone and decides he’s having a peaceful night and that he’ll deal with this in the morning.

He probably should’ve taken the warning a bit more seriously.

The fact that the Archivist wasn’t that much taller than him and was currently injured and alone had set him at ease, he had the power here. He had The Vast with him.

Mike doesn’t remember what happens in the moments after he opens the door. A flash of annoyance, the slow build of anger, then nothing.

Nothing is shattered into a billion tiny pieces as he feels a pain he hasn’t felt since he was playing in a field at 8 years of age.

It feels like someone shatters his skull, he can’t move, he can’t scream, but most importantly, he can’t _breathe_.

He can’t breathe and it reminds him of nights spent under his bed, hands over his ears and counting out his breaths, waiting for the next strike, or for the monster to get closer.

It’s too close and he can’t feel The Vast here.

Mike claws and scrapes for an eternity, the more ground he makes the further he’s pulled under, the closer it crushes him. He has no idea how long it’s been, or if he’s even dragging himself in the right direction anymore.

The memory of air in his lungs, of nothing around him but blue sky is all that keeps him going. If The Flesh couldn’t have him, if The Corruption couldn’t have him, if _The Distortionl_ couldn’t have him, then there was no way in all of eternity, that _The Buried_ could have him.

He was air, and flight, of laughing breathlessly after a fall, the swooping feeling in your gut as you stand on the edge of something vast and unknowable.

He was-

He was trapped, until he wasn’t.

His fingers break the dirt suddenly, the nails long since worn away and then he’s- he isn’t buried, anymore. His hands twitch and he starts scraping dirt from his eyes, he coughs, trying to expel the dirt from his lungs, dragging himself further up and away from the crushing weight of the dirt, until he can pull himself out of the ground entirely and collapse on the nearby grass, breath coming in fits and starts, lungs ceased up. He vomits black sludge and coughs up a clump of dirt, then another and, another, until he can _breathe_ again. He feels like he can still feel the dirt in his lungs, settling, threatening to drown him.

Mike does what he’s always done and falls.

He falls until his breathing is steady and his eyes are dry, until his hands stop shaking and all that’s left is _exhaustion_.

Mike lands in his flat. Goes to check that his door is locked on shaky legs and that everything is in its place. He doesn’t feel safe, but he can’t think straight and doesn’t want to risk going elsewhere.

Mike collapses onto his bed and sleeps.

His nightmares are different and much the same now.

He dreams of his parents for the first time in _years_.

He dreams that he’s 17 and being crushed under the weight of his childhood home right alongside his parent’s, their faces decayed, his mother’s bright blue eyes cloudy and swollen, his fathers eye sockets were empty and leaking down his face, their fingers with the flesh falling free of the bone reaching endlessly for him, trying to pull him further down, their voices telling him that they missed him, that he should come home.

He wakes up choking on his own vomit.

It takes a week for him to leave his flat and actually go _out_ into the world, he usually just went to the roof of his building and sat their when he needed space, or he’d fall into the arms of the Vast.

When he does it’s because he needs groceries. It’s also because he’s hungry. Or, The Vast is.

He figures he can get both things done at once, the milk in his fridge is curdled and the rest of his food isn’t much better.

So, he leaves his flat. He gives the person changing a lightbulb in the lobby vertigo as he passes, making them reach out for the wall and close their eyes, breathing hard through gritted teeth, it’ll be fine until he can sacrifice someone properly, later. For now, it’s enough to clear his head and give him a bit of strength.

He straightens and leaves the building, looking up into the sky, not so vast and unending in the city, not at ground level, still, it’s big and blue and beautiful and he relishes the sun on his face and the air in his lungs.

It takes an hour to find someone worthwhile. A man teaching his daughter how to clean the gutters of their home. He waits by a bus stop for the man to finally coax his daughter up the ladder, hand outstretched and smiling down at her when he hits the man with a wave of vertigo. He sways just as she grabs his hand and he tips forward and falls into the Vast, Mike doesn’t release him until he makes up his mind on if the man should live or not, watching his body hit the ground and his daughter screaming from where she’s clinging to the ladder.

One of the neighbours comes out of the house across the street, already calling an ambulance and trying to comfort the crying girl from the ground.

Mike catches the bus before he finds out if the man is alive or not, it’s not worth knowing, the knowledge won’t change anything. It isn’t like he takes pleasure from killing, more interested in the moments before one hits the ground then the actual impact itself. Besides, he’d have to wait for the next bus and it’s not worth it.

He buys his groceries, milk, eggs, some vegetables, other things that have since expired in his fridge, he makes sure to only buy things of the highest price.

He charges the cost to Simon’s credit card.

Going out is easier after that. The Buried still weighs in the back of his head and he changes some habits. He can’t wear anything around his neck anymore, which is fine until winter. He’s been wearing them so that they fall open in front of his body lately anyways, the impulse to cover as much of his neck and face long since gone.

He can’t take the lift anymore.

Or anything underground.

Which annoys him, he’s spent years ridding himself of the fears that plagued him throughout his childhood and now he’s back at square one, only now instead of running for shelter at the mere suggestion of a storm he’s running _from_ the shelter.

He goes on vacation. It’s the least he can give himself. Maybe he’d go to North America. He goes to the Grand Canyon and a tragic accident befalls another tourist. Sad, really, how someone can just fall to their death like that. He wonders, distantly, if his mum would be proud of him. Probably not.

In the end he ends up at Lake O’Hara and lays back, feet dangling down into nothing and staring up at the sky, watching it change from bright blue to orange and pink to and endless black, flecked with bright silver, he picks out some constellations that he remembers from childhood, easy here, away from light pollution.

When it’s time to honour The Vast, he goes to Whistler-Blackcomb and he takes the gondola across, admiring the view. He gives all the tourists on the Cloudraker Skybridge, newly opened this year, enough vertigo that he gets the bridge to himself, he looks up and the sky feels like it could reach down and crush him. When he looks down, he feels a small swoop of vertigo, the ground through the grate falling away below him as he walked.

He hops onto the railing and has his lunch, it’s a nice enough day, chilly so high up in the mountains, he tugs his scarf a little closer to his neck then drags it down and away when he feels his throat close up. He swallows, waits a few seconds, leaning forward a bit. He takes a bite of his sandwich, chewing slowly as the wind whips at his hair. He feels the bridge sway gently as someone tries to brave the vast expanse laid out before them and he increases the sense of vertigo.

Some people were just so rude.

He sets his sandwich on his lap and opens up his thermos, he’d gotten a new tea and had decided that today was the day to try it. The view itself is breathtaking, vast and sprawling, the rolling hills mixed in with the mountaintops, lakes that looked more like puddles and tree’s like toys, it looked as if it could go on forever.

When he was done his lunch, he stretched his arms up, over his head and stood up on the railing, turned on his heel and fell backwards into The Vast.

Mike thinks about revenge sometimes, but Simon warns him off, and since he’s technically a Fairchild and technically using Simon’s money to pay for everything, he relents. Simon also told him it was a Hunter who was after him and, honestly? Mike isn’t stupid. He isn’t involving himself in The Hunt at this point in his life.

Revenge can wait.

He has skies to explore.

**Author's Note:**

> now all the days of begging  
> the days of theft  
> no more gasping for a breath  
> the air has filled me head-to-toe  
> and i can see the ground far below  
> i have this breath  
> and i hold it tight  
> and i keep it in my chest  
> with all my might  
> i pray to god this breath will last  
> as it pushes past my lips  
> as i gasp
> 
> Between Two Lungs - Florence and the Machine  
> Here: have this video of Cloudraker Skybridge: https://youtu.be/NHJMwbvW-Vo?t=111


End file.
